Joe Wyatt: Gasp! Wealthy liberals donate, too

For reasons not clear, the Charleston Daily Mail publishes the paranoia of syndicated columnist and frequent FoxNews commentator Michelle Malkin. The right winger evidently became bug-eyed with shock upon discovering that wealthy liberals donate to candidates of their choice (Daily Mail, July 26).

Malkin writes as if she is the first to perceive the liberal “agenda.” She cites the progressive wish list that includes “social justice, climate change, voting rights, gun control, efforts to ‘turn red states blue’” and more. Who would have guessed it? Malkin spouted her non-news with an air of investigative self-congratulation suggestive of the moment that Stanley stumbled upon Livingston. She evokes images of herself as one who only briefly is able to gaze upon the products of her own brilliance for fear that her head will melt like a that of an Indiana Jones movie Nazi.

Her primary talent appears to be the application of scary adjectives to routine events. To Ms. Malkin, Harry Reid is “unhinged,” wealthy liberal Philip G. LaMarche is a “militant” and people like them are “plotting behind closed doors.” Such folks “coordinate and finance a web of at least 132 left-wing groups.” Seemingly, Malkin was horrified to discover they are involved with the American Federation of Teachers (full disclosure, I am a member) and its nearly two million dues payers who, like the elitists they are, get up every day and work for salaries that average $50,000 a year.

What passes for thinking is revealed in the title of her book, “Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks and Cronies.” Her claims may be baseless, but they play to the crowd that is convinced that Obama is a socialistic, heathen, commie, soccer-watching, French wine-drinking, Muslim pansy who won’t invade a country even when John McCain thinks it would be a peck of fun.

Elsewhere, Malkin has concluded that unemployment benefits have “become an excuse for people to remain unemployed once they lose a job by discouraging job search activities …” That, in Malkin’s world, explains why someone who was laid off after 20 years of employment in which he had worked his way up to $1,000 a week, would then find benefits of $250 a week to be the Elysian Fields. Without Ms. Malkin’s wisdom, how would we have known that the absence of employment had nothing much to do with folks being unable to find jobs?

If one is yet unconvinced of her reality-challenged extremism, consider that Malkin also is author of “The Case for Internment,” a 2004 book in which she put her nimble mind to work to show us that neither racism nor unwarranted fear of Japanese Americans was involved when, during World War II, our government herded thousands of innocent U.S. citizens into prison camps. They weren’t murdered like Jews at Auschwitz, so where was the harm, asked Malkin who is (readers, please sit down) … of Asian descent.

Joseph Wyatt is a Gazette contributing columnist and professor emeritus at Marshall University.